Professional photography and video for personal injury & medico-legal cases across the UK

Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy, updated May 2018

Who we are

This website address is: https://sharpenyourimage.co.uk

Sharpen Your Image is the trading name of Simon Brown, a freelance medical photographer and consultant based in the West Midlands. Simon may be contacted vis the Contact Form on this site or directly by email at simon.brown@sharpenyourimage.co.uk

Sharpen Your Image is committed to respecting and protecting the privacy of anyone using our site and the confidentiality of any information that you provide us with. The purpose of this statement is to set out how we use any personal information that we may obtain from you.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Sharpen Your Image provides a photography and video service to the legal profession across the UK. We receive instructions from solicitors and law partnerships for professional medical photographs and video recordings to support or defend cases of personal injury, accident claims and medical negligence.

When we receive an instruction, we are given the following personal data about the claimant or defendant in the case:

These details are necessary in order to process the case for the person making the request.

Once an appointment is confirmed and the photographs taken, these are delivered to the requesting law firm in printed format. The privacy policy for that legal firm then applies to subsequent use of those printed photographs.

How we protect your data

The original camera images are stored with Sharpen Your Image for a period of five years. This necessary in case follow-up photographs or recordings are required during that period. Images are stored in electronic form on local, secure, password-protected and encrypted drives. No images are held on cloud-based systems.

After five years, images will be securely and permanently deleted. If copies have been requested either by the subject (claimant or defendant in the case) or by the legal firm which raised the original instruction, then Sharpen Your Image has no control over the use of those image files.

Any printed requests or correspondence are shredded as soon as the photographs are delivered. Electronic communications (emails) are stored on a password-protected business email system and deleted after five years.

Who we share your data with

Sharpen Your Image consists of a network of registered medical photographers around the UK, with referrals co-ordinated by Simon Brown. If one of these photographers is appropriate to undertake the required photography, the data above will be shared with him or her in order to make contact, arrange an appointment and to take the necessary photographs or video recording.

The data is not shared in any other way.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on this site we collect the data shown in the Comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

Contact forms

If you use our Contact Form to write to us, we save your name, email address and the date received in order to get back to you and answer your message. If this leads to a commission for work then that will be saved for up to five years, otherwise the contact details will be deleted after six months. We never use any contact information for marketing purposes, nor is this shared with any other party.

Cookies

Most websites use cookies in order to make them work, or to work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the website. They help us to understand how our customers and potential customers use our website so we can develop and improve the design, layout, content and function of the site.

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer’s hard drive by websites that you visit. They save and retrieve pieces of information about your visit to the website – for example, how you entered the site, how you navigated through the site and what information and documentation was of interest to you. This means that when you go back to a website, it can give you tailored options based on the information it has stored about you on your last visit.

Some of our cookies are used to simply collect information about how visitors use our website and these types of cookies collect the information in an anonymous form.

If you are uncomfortable with the use of cookies, you can disable cookies on your computer by changing the settings in the preferences or options menu in your browser. You can set your browser to reject or block cookies or to tell you when a website tries to put a cookie on your computer. You can also delete any cookies that are already stored on your computer’s hard drive. However, please be aware that if you do delete and block all cookies from our website, parts of the site will not then work. This is because some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of our website to operate. Likewise, you may not be able to use some products and services on other websites without cookies.

To find out more about cookies, including seeing what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

If you do not wish to accept cookies from our website, please leave this site immediately and then delete and block all cookies from this site.

What rights you have over your data

If you have left comments on this site or if you are, or have been, the subject of our instructions received for photography or video recording, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Data is stored locally in the UK at Sharpen Your Image’s registered address and is never transferred to any other location.